ABSTRACT
Too often governments and communities are adversely affected by disasters simply because the most basic information for resilience is missing or inaccessible. For example: How much rain has fallen? Is my children’s school safe from earthquakes and flood? Which roads are underwater and inaccessible in a flood? How many communities will be affected by drought or flood during El Niño? Without this information, it is impossible to make informed decisions. Traditional approaches to collecting datasets necessary for this informed decision making typically take decades to collect, often rely on top-down approaches, and rarely enable communities to be part of the data gathering and its ultimate use.GFDRR has been implementing its Open Data for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI) since 2010 in more than 30 highly vulnerable countries. Engaging communities to map their own communities has proven to be a powerful and sustainable approach to building resilience, from Village Elders mapping community borders in Jakarta for the first time, to student volunteers mapping Kathmandu before and after the 2015 earthquake, to communities in flood hit Malawi mapping their own villages (village location and name, community facilities, roads etc.).
The process also connects local mappers with the international community of open mappers, provides fundamental on-the-job training and ultimately provides a trained network of volunteers who can respond to map damaged areas when disasters strike and map exposure and vulnerabilities to anticipate future disaster impacts. The Government of Belgium committed to building resilience through innovation in Sub-Saharan Africa through the allocation of EUR 600,000 in funding to the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) in December 2016. Uganda, Niger, Tanzania, and Mozambique were selected to pilot innovations in disaster risk management. The innovations included novel approaches to risk assessment and the collection and visualization of hazard data in real-time from social media.
